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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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NECX debut: Shaping the next era of energy
The sold-out inaugural Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX) got off to a roaring start in Atlanta, Ga., Tuesday morning with an opening plenary that was a live highlight reel discussing the latest industry achievements.
Starting with a lively promo video that left the audience amped up for Entergy’s CEO and NEI chair Drew Marsh, who welcomed everyone to the event, hosted jointly by the American Nuclear Society and the Nuclear Energy Institute. He spoke to a full house of more than 1,300 attendees, promising a blend of science, technology, policy, and advocacy centered around the future of nuclear energy.
David Reger, Elia Merzari, Paolo Balestra, Sebastian Schunert, Yassin Hassan, Stephen King
Nuclear Technology | Volume 210 | Number 7 | July 2024 | Pages 1258-1278
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2023.2218245
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An in-depth understanding of the flow physics in packed beds is critical for developing simulation tools for pebble bed reactors. Advances in computing power have now made the full-core pebble-resolved computational fluid dynamics simulation of these systems possible. This work presents validation of the velocity and pressure predictions made by the spectral element code NekRS followed by a study of the turbulent kinetic energy and turbulent heat flux budgets. Two cases with corresponding experiments are considered: a bed of 67 pebbles with Re = 1460 and a bed of 789 pebbles with 324 < Re < 1024. Velocity and pressure drop comparisons are performed with the two cases, respectively. Good agreement is found between the experiments and their respective NekRS simulations.
The 67-pebble case was then used to perform a direct numerical simulation to extract the turbulent kinetic energy and turbulent heat flux budget terms. Analysis of the turbulent kinetic energy production revealed large areas of negative production near the bottom surfaces of the pebbles. Further investigation revealed a trend between the average amount of negative turbulent kinetic energy production and the local porosity. These results continue to suggest that inertial effects play a large role in differentiating near-wall flow from bed-interior flow.